Vertigo

Vertigo
by shaun roundy; Every climber has a personal reason to climb, just as everyone has their own reason to wake up in the morning, to go to school or work, and to live through another day. I rediscovered my reason a year ago on the crux of a slightly-overhanging route up Logan Canyon.; Robert Decker and I were attacking Conventional Arms for the first time. The route was rated 5.11a, which meant we could expect a challenge the first time up but easier ascents once we knew the holds. Morning shadows still covered our side of the wall, and a comfortable summer breeze blew through my short hair as I tied in, chalked up, turned to Robert, and said "Climbing."; I covered the lower half of the route easily and reached the ledge at the halfway point. I reached up to clip the fifth bolt, then mantled up on my left hand while gripping an undercling pinch hold with my right. The rock was smooth, cool, and refreshing. The slight overhang didn't allow a no-hands rest, so I took a quick look at the next moves and started up before my forearms started to get pumped.; Robert yelled encouragement from below. "Yer lookin' good! Go for the on-sight!"; Above the ledge, holds became sparse. I worked my way up on small sidepulls and clipped the sixth bolt. I surveyed the rock quickly for my next sequence and moved to the seventh bolt. The crux came just as blood filled my forearm muscles and stretched my skin tight around them. My left-hand reached above me and I clung to a small but sharp slanted sidepull with my fingertips. As I leaned right against the side-pull and stepped up onto narrow edges, my right hand hold became too low. I hooked a heel around the corner of the arete to keep myself from barn-dooring out when I let go with my right hand.; By this time, I was fifty feet off the deck. I wasn't sure how much longer I could hold on to the wall strong, and I couldn't see my next move. Why am I doing this? I asked myself. This isn't fun! But it was also not an ideal time to ponder such questions. I'll think about this after I get back on the ground. For now, though, I gotta finish this.; "Hey, Ribbit, I'm getting a bit scared!" I imagined Robert standing on the ground below, ready to feed rope quickly to me, craning his neck to watch in case I slipped. I let go of my right hand hold, found a new one, and hoisted myself higher. "I'm not sure I can do this!" I yelled as I moved. My voice trembled ever-so-slightly.; Robert, on the other hand, sounded perfectly calm as he shouted his only beta: "So fall! Forget the on-sight--you can red point it later!"; Oh, yeah, I thought. No big deal. It sounded so simple. Robert had saved my life earlier that summer when I took a forty-five foot slide & whistler combo in Moab. A mere six foot fall on solid limestone would be nothing.; "Watch me! I'm gonna lunge!" I yelled down. I cocked my legs as much as I could and tried to shoot for a ledge a foot and a half above me. My hand struck the rock six inches too low. "I'm off!" I shouted as I fell backward into open space and dropped until the rope caught me soft.; "Wa-hoo!" I wanted to laugh. The short burst of adrenaline cleared my head instantly.; "Feel better?" Robert asked.; "Lots!" I shouted back. After shaking out my forearms, I climbed back on the wall and finished the route, this time with no fear. Even so, reaching the chains felt incredibly rewarding. By then, it felt good to have been afraid and to have successfully overcome the challenge.; Years ago, I vowed to never let fear stop me from doing anything that I really wanted to do. I figured that no matter what, life takes everything you've got--all your time, all your energy, everything inevitably fades away one way or another. You might as well get something in return.; As I lowered from the chains, the overhung cliff dropping away from me, I learned another lesson on fear management. I found that I became more successful when I lowered my expectations, my demands on myself. When my expectations weren't so high, when I became willing to do something imperfectly the first time, my vertigo--the fear of falling, of failing, of not reaching the goal--disappeared.; I enjoyed myself more as well. And that's the reason I climb, anyway.; Here's an extra one for you, also not top-quality writing, but a great little adventure:; Hell's Throat and Back
by shaun roundy; It was sort of like one of those dreams where you're standing around in your underwear, feeling entirely out of place, only better. Eight of us stood in the Little Beaver lift line, surrounded by gawking New Year's Eve-Eve night skiers. Some of us wore cross country skis, others, snow shoes; all of us carried packs with ropes, harnesses, biners, and belay devices hanging off the back.; Christmas Break had gone by quickly, and the approach of Winter Quarter had made us almost frantic to get in as much adventure as possible before seven-thirty a.m. classes and work cramped our schedules again.; "What's all that stuff for?" asked the eight year old girl standing in line next to me.; "We're going camping in Hell's Throat," I answered. "It's a cave on backside that drops a hundred and fifty feet straight down."; "Wow," she said as she looked around again at the packs and gear.; We took off our packs to ride the lift, then headed off along a trail out of bounds. Around the first corner, all the lights from the resort disappeared and left us in a sort of dreamland. In the dark, only two shades were visible--snow-gray and everything-else gray. Our imaginations filled in the rest. The nearly-full moon came out from behind the clouds often enough to light up the entire mountainside and canyon below the trail. Each time, we would stop hiking or gliding along to stare down at it and say, "Wow," as if any words at all could communicate the awe and excitement we felt inside. A foot or two of fresh powder had dumped over the Rockies a day or two earlier, leaving the mountain looking like a heavily-frosted cake, pine trees like fat, waxy candles, the world a fairy-land dream.; It wasn't long before we had reached the end of the trail in "the" ravine. A hundred yards below us, Hell's Throat gaped open toward the sky, its jagged mouth taking up ten feet of a twenty-five-foot-wide ravine. It always amazed me that no skier had ever fallen down it.; At the mouth, I wrapped lengths of webbing around a large tree and clipped biners in to tie off on while others kicked and shoveled snow down the hole. When someone had a particularly large piece of snow, everyone would stop working and listen to the silence, counting off the seconds silently before the snowball hit bottom, booming and echoing all the way up.; Last year, Randy had been the first one down and shouted up that we needed more snow to cover the rocks and make a place to sleep. Lucky dog. Standing on the bottom, watching hundreds of pounds of snow fall and thunder to the ground, shaking the air around him, must have been unforgettable. Hell's Throat is officially known as Beaver Cave, but Johnny climbed most of the way out last year and earned its new name.; Soon we finished dumping snow and I lowered down the hole. I thought of my first time inside and shuddered. It was six years ago, one year before I first climbed or rapelled and got real ropes and gear for Christmas. We had bought a length of rope at a hardware store and tied knots to hold onto as we climbed down. We had been told that the cave was 90' deep, but when we tied a flashlight on the end of the rope, lowered it, and dropped rocks and sticks past it, we discovered that our rope only reached half way to the bottom. We climbed thirty feet down the rope anyway. Now I looked down into the black hole, and the thought of hanging on to a hemp rope, not even tied in to anything, made my stomach feel funny, almost as if I had really fallen.; Soon I stood alone on the snow mound in the bottom. I had a flashlight in my pack that I had carried down on my back, but I left it there. Instead, I tried to peer through the dark, squinting and holding my breath to listen closely and make sure I was alone. I had a few minutes to think, and remembered other days spent inside this cave. After a while, you get used to the way your words echo around the limestone sides, and you nearly forget what it's like to be outside, with open spaces and blue skies.; Most of all, it felt good to know that everyone there had come for a vacation, a break from studies and stress, and that, like open spaces, such responsibilities would be forgotten until we had climbed back out of the cave and into our cars to go home.; Soon everyone was down. Most of us got to work shoveling and smoothing out the snow while others cooked and prepared the dinner items we had collected from our homes. Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, dinner rolls, even cranberries. A regular holiday feast. As soon as we had eaten and set up the latrine by stretching a tarp across the lower corner of the cave, hung by stoppers set in cracks and quick draws, we were ready to explore the lower intestine. None of us had ever been all the way down the next pitch, but Johnny and I had hung eighty feet above the floor on a too-short rope and taken a good look. It had looked promising, even when dim flashlights made it impossible to judge distance or recognize far-away features.; Sending all eight of us down and up a few ropes took far longer than we had anticipated. Only three of us held our breath and squeezed through a fissure to drop into the lowest section of the cave, which we named the Appendix. By the time I pulled the ropes out of the Lower Intestine and lowered myself down into the bottom of the first pitch, everyone else was in their bags, and a few snores echoed around the cavern. It was almost five thirty in the morning.; And New Year's Eve Day had arrived. That meant that 1995 had slid quietly into existence at the International Date Line somewhere out above dark, churning whitecaps in the Pacific an hour and a half ago. I was a bit late, but it would do. I pulled the sparkling cider and plastic champagne glasses from my pack, only a few had been crushed, then lit the firecrackers. "Happy New Year!" I shouted. My voice reverberated around the chamber with the blasts from the firecrackers. I opened the bottles and began to pour for those willing to stick a hand out of their sleeping bags to hold a glass.; "You are a goof!" accused Michelle, but she took a glass just the same and toasted until the cider was gone.; We woke at nine or so and got ready to break camp. We'd send most of the people up before hoisting the packs out, which took a few hours. Twenty feet from the top, sounds quit echoing so much. Strains from a harmonica welcomed and encouraged tired climbers to finish their way up on prussicks. Four inches of new snow had fallen overnight.; As we headed down the highway, heater on and radio soft, the awareness of our fast-paced student lives and responsibilities returned painfully, accompanied by chill blains as feeling returned to frozen fingers and numb toes. But as the protective numbness left our bodies, we discovered that a different kind of numbness within lingered pleasantly. With our blood still tinged by adrenaline and peace, homework and routine seemed more bearable.; Our dream vacation had ended, but it had done its job well.